St. Catherine University President Becky Roloff announced last night that Ahlers had been terminated. And local police said they are considering what they can charge him with beyond “falsely reporting a crime.”

Dianne Binns, president of the St. Paul NAACP, said Ahlers’ decision to describe the nonexistent suspect as a black man is rooted in the racism that perpetuated slavery and the oppression of blacks for hundreds of years.

“That’s what black people live with,” she said. “We’ve been lynched, and we’ve been put in jail to find out later you haven’t done it. That’s the sad thing about it. It hasn’t stopped.”

The actual perpetrator’s racist stunt cost the taxpayers both financially and psychologically. The Rootstates that, while they were checking out Ahlers’ false story, local police had to put the campus “on lockdown for hours as 55 police officers, four K-9 units and Minnesota State Patrol aircraft searched for the alleged suspect.” And Sgt. Ernster of the St. Paul Police Department said to the Star-Tribune that Ahlers “‘had basically 1,800 students held captive in their dorm rooms at St. Catherine’s . . . and it had residents of the Mac-Groveland and Highland Park communities fearing they would be hurt in their homes.”

Lucia Brawley is a Harvard- and Yale-educated writer, producer, actor, and political organizer. She runs the progressive political Facebook group Consenting to Lead. To learn more, please go to luciabrawley.com.

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